What Top Talent Really Wants in 2025
Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigáñez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.
Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.
Every week, we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.
What we discovered from 1,000+ of the top professionals
Every year, we ask our Nova members how they think, grow, and choose where to work. This year, over 1,200 Novas shared their insights — and the results reveal how ambition, fulfillment, and flexibility are being redefined across industries.
Our Top Talent Report 2025 captures three core sections with a large amount of insights:
- The state of Top Talent: Job satisfaction, salary patterns, and how openness to change is shifting across Europe.
- The ideal job: What high performers truly value from inspiring leadership to hybrid work and balanced workloads.
- The destination for Top Talent: Where everyone wants to work (hint: European product companies are rising fast).
Let’s review together some of the highlights, while we leave it to you to dive deeper into all the aspects of the report that can be downloaded at the bottom of the article. Enjoy the reading.
Top Talent ideal job: from “perks” to “performance enablers”
In a market shaped by economic uncertainty and shifting career priorities, you might expect top performers to anchor around compensation.
Yet the data tells a more nuanced story.
While base salary remains the anchor, what truly differentiates an ideal employer is how it enables growth and impact.
Top talent is optimizing for:
- Strong brands and inspiring leadership – they want to learn from the best, not just work for them.
- Balanced workloads and flexibility – not “nice to have,” but necessary to sustain performance.
- High-caliber peers – ambitious people thrive among ambitious people.
- Growth and recognition – career acceleration beats comfort every time.
As Marina Córcoles, Talent Agent at Nova, puts it:
“They seek high-performance environments where ambition and recognition align.”
The seniority gradient: growth early, autonomy later
Across seniority levels, the report shows a clear evolution of priorities:
- Students and young professionals seek brand prestige, fast growth, and international exposure.
- Mid-level professionals focus on leadership quality and learning velocity.
- Executives prize autonomy, clarity, and trust.
Your EVP (Employer Value Proposition) shouldn’t be static. It must evolve with the career maturity of your audience. The best employers already mirror this, offering “fast track” experiences for emerging talent, and “freedom to lead” propositions for senior hires.
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Job satisfaction: the hidden driver of retention
This year’s report also highlights that job satisfaction among top talent is diverging sharply by role.
Fields like Operations, Legal, and Academia report satisfaction levels above 80%, while Sales, Marketing, and Investment Banking lag behind. Interestingly, salary doesn’t fully explain the gap, many of the happiest groups trade higher pay for stronger alignment between work, purpose, and culture. It’s a reminder that retention starts with fulfillment, not compensation. The best employers don’t just measure performance — they engineer satisfaction through clarity, fairness, and leadership that connects day-to-day work with a sense of progress.
The AI shift: empowerment meets uncertainty
Another striking finding this year is how deeply AI has entered the daily workflow of top talent — and how mixed their feelings are about it.
Across all countries and seniority levels, over 80% of respondents use AI tools daily, especially for analysis, communication, and automation.
Young professionals and executives lead adoption, while students are quickly catching up.
Yet, beneath that excitement, there’s a quiet layer of concern: many fear parts of their roles could be replaced or redefined by automation — particularly in Legal, Sales, and Finance.
Others, especially in Product and Software, show higher confidence that AI will enhance, not replace, their contribution.
For HR and Talent leaders, the takeaway is clear:
The next frontier of engagement isn’t just about offering AI tools — it’s about building trust in how they’re used. Leaders who invest in AI literacy, ethical frameworks, and reskilling programs will win twice, increasing productivity while reducing anxiety.
What this means for your 2025 attraction strategy
- Re-center leadership in your employer brand. People don’t join companies; they join leaders.
- Make flexibility a performance tool, not a perk. Hybrid is the default, but intentional hybrid wins.
- Curate peer excellence. Show that top people work with top people — it’s the most credible form of employer branding.
- Design value-based compensation. Clarity and balance around base pay matter as much as the number itself.
- Speak to ambition, not security. Top talent moves where the learning curve is steepest.
- Integrate AI as an empowerment strategy. Frame technology as an enabler of human potential — not a threat to it.
📥 Download the full report
The Top Talent Report 2025 is live — explore the full data, insights, and rankings with detailed breakdowns by industry, role, and career stage.
Uncover how satisfaction, ambition, and flexibility evolve across functions and how top professionals are shaping the future of work.
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